This is not to say that poetry is innocent of inviting these kinds of readings. Too much poetry exists in a niche, solipsistic space. This poetry does nothing interesting and says little in doing it, despite the protestations of its critics who find meaning only through the awkwardly forced machinations of their own analyses. To be openly and verbosely critical of another poet, to call their work impenetrably dull, and dare being labelled populist, is to potentially fracture a delicate ecosystem that thrives on keeping its borders closed to the public and its language (appeal, even) meaningful only to those who dwell within. I know this: I have committed these sins; I have written and defended bad, boring, supposedly ‘experimental’ poetry lacking in entertainment, a chore to digest.

Then you read a book like Michael Aiken’s Satan Repentant – a work possessed of a devilish energy, intellect, and glorious control of the utterly grotesque, humanly divine, and divinely human – and you recall how joyful and entertaining poetry can be, especially when it features a version of Satan resisting his fate as the Enemy of all. Slipping away from the Serious Poetic Tradition one assumes Aiken’s work might associate with given its portentous title, Satan Repentant is a book-length poem skilfully dirty dancing with the oral tradition of poetry. It is designed to enrapture an audience as it wilfully waltzes with notions of individuality, religious scepticism (particularly the latent hypocrisies of its dogma), the role of art, and the meaning of being human, but never in a manner that draws away from the brutal, celestial drama at the core of its narrative.

It begins with Aiken’s masterful control of language, a song ‘of nothing’ from which everything grows. The events in the book exist within the lurid landscapes crafted by its rhetoric. It gives the reader the ethereal gates of Heaven, the septic sewers of Hell, and an Earth helplessly stuck between them. It is a voice that is archaic but modern, always shifting registers, trimmed of the fat of any unnecessary words. It is a voice that points to, but never leans on, Walt Whitman and Charles Olson, breathing in tune to the rugged jolts of its frequent recourse to short and sharp sounds, with lines often ending abruptly, lending the scansion a hurried, irregular, but declamatory syntax. It is a voice of the slowly corrupted angels and monstrously cheeky devils; of an ‘enraged, / enfeebled’ God; of the perfectly imperfect ‘three-in-one’ Jesus; of the unspeakably cruel Teresa of Calcutta, ‘that awful God-witch’ whose ‘tentacled mouths consume the souls of babies’; of the deliriously verbose, flabby ‘pig king’ Beelzebub; and of the poet–artist Satan, who speaks for the work’s free verse: ‘A poet is not one / to labour greatly and in time be master / of all the terms in the world. I do not /crack a whip, insist my lines play nice.’ It is a voice that seems to bellow from the vocal chords of a loquacious scumbag priest, drunk on sacrament wine, whose sermons reference slasher flicks and pornos, William Blake and David Fincher, Romanticism and Surrealism, all the while holding true to a faith in the human spirit, even as it loses faith in the divine.

Michael Aiken (right) with David Malouf at an ABR–Sydney Ideas event in 2016. ABR Patron, David Malouf, nominated Aiken as his Fellow.

Through this language, Aiken gives the reader a hero’s journey: Satan’s awakening to his own unease and ‘shame’ at being so long at the beckoning of his base nature, his desire ‘to no longer be / the Enemy of everything’. Sent by God to experience a life of human suffering to earn his redemption, Satan rejects the temptations of his hellish servants who, unlike their master, cannot refuse their nature, and evades, not always successfully, the cruel tricks of the empyreans keen to restore their myopic view of moral order. Instead, he comes to seek and find meaning in poetry and art, its vital and life-affirming ability ‘to rethink all creation’. No longer is Satan the debonair anti-hero, as so often seems to be the case in fiction; rather, he becomes Lucifer, the Light Bringer, the heroically stoic poet–philosopher, refusing and recognising the fallacies of Heaven and Hell’s confused absolutes of good and evil: its ‘vile hierarchy’. He uncovers his own divinity as a creator, and in the brutal, destructive everyplace of the book’s conclusion (Heaven and Hell intermingled on Earth), as all is undone, Satan/Lucifer mutters his status as a god, inviting in its final line ‘a language to speak of itself’ to birth a new world. It is poetic and redemptive.

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job with Boils. English: Illustrations to the Book of Job, The Linnell Set, object 6 (Butlin 551.6). Photo: Wiki Commons

Repentant – which grew out of Michael Aiken’s ABR Laureate’s Fellowship in 2016 – is a book that ultimately needs no explication, giving us characters that are visceral, fleshy, and conflicted, and a story filled with memorable set-pieces, description, and astounding flights of oration. It is not only rich in symbol and theme but needing neither to be explained nor enjoyed. Aiken’s book, entertaining and intellectually fulfilling, eschews the withdrawn navel-gazing of so much contemporary poetry. Amen.